The best golf of the year is being played right now, and by the best players on the planet. And the last major of the season was four weeks ago. What are the odds?

Pretty unpredictable. After all, we saw what the majors season turned into ... and actually, the less said about it, the better, with all due respect to the winners. But it’s awfully impressive that the winner of the last major, the PGA Championship, is the same one bobbing to the surface amidst all the excellence on display the last few weeks.

Rory McIlroy is on one of those rolls. It’s so good, in fact, that it might make you mad that he’s on it right now. The Masters is still seven months away. Is there any way he can store it for the winter, stick it on the shelf in the basement, and crack it open next spring in Augusta?

Can we ask that of all the contenders from this BMW Championship that concluded Sunday at Crooked Stick? From Phil Mickelson, who went into the final day tied for the lead, shot a 70 and still almost got run off the course down the stretch? From Tiger Woods, who didn’t exactly shame himself by shooting a 68 on Sunday, yet was also left hanging at the end?

McIlroy left them all behind. Not as far behind as he did at the PGA, or even at the Deutsche Bank a week ago, but he pretty much went Godzilla on them all early and never slowed. He began the day one stroke behind Mickelson and Vijay Singh, at 15-under, and methodically ground them and everyone else to dust.

Three birdies on the front nine, three on the back, leaving him at a ridiculous 21-under and up by three with two holes to go. He simply had to make sure he didn’t hit it into the ocean from Indiana from then on.

Thus, McIlroy’s month has gone like this: He ran away with the PGA in early August to win his second major and regain his footing after a shaky year-plus following his 2011 U.S. Open win. He put himself in the Tiger-Jack conversation with two majors at age 23. Last week he held off another sparkling field—this is, after all, the FedEx Cup playoff—to win in Boston.

Now he has wins in consecutive weeks. It seems hard to fathom, but that makes him the first golfer to go back-to-back in more than three years. The last to do it was Tiger, in August 2009.

Try to get your head around this: Less than four months later, Woods had that little fender-bender near his Florida home, after which he didn’t win an official PGA event until this year. That may explain precisely why so much time has gone by since one golfer has been good enough to win two weeks in a row. The constant yearning for the answer to “Is Tiger back?” is entirely justified, because what has been the alternative?

That season, Woods won six times. The back-to-back wins, in the Buick and the Bridgestone, came in a stretch where he won three times in four tournaments—and in a fifth, the ’09 PGA, he was caught from behind by Y.E. Yang, a defeat that no one knew would be as momentous as it became in hindsight. He later won the BMW and was runner-up in the Tour Championship, the finale of the FedEx Cup competition.

With Sunday’s win, McIlroy is this year’s FedEx leader going into the Tour Championship. He also has a tour-high four wins this season. Basically, he’s having the best year of any golfer since Tiger in ’09, and that year wasn’t considered part of Tiger’s pantheon.

By those standards, McIlroy really is on top. Everybody is truly chasing him. If he wins again in two weeks, there will be even less of a question.

It was hard for him to comprehend all of that when asked, by NBC after the BMW was over, if he could have envisioned any of this when he joined the Tour full time.

“I didn’t think that everything would happen that quickly,’’ he said. “But I’ve gotten on a pretty good run, and I want to keep that going as long as I can.’’

The question that will linger over the fall and winter: Can he keep it going all the way to the Masters? Otherwise, all that greatness might get completely overlooked.